The Custos Care Foundation, a Foundation founded by the wife of the governor of Enugu State, Mrs. Nkechinyere Mbah, has given a new lease of life to a baby, Nkechi.
To Mrs. Rapuluchukwu Mmedo of Obune Inyi, Oji River LGA, and her baby, it was a new lease of life as they were finally discharged from newborn Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital, Enugu, after 42 days of life-saving medical admission in the hospital.
This was even as the parents of the baby named her Nkechi, after the governor’s wife, Mrs. Nkechinyere Mbah, following her life-saving intervention.
Born premature to an indigent family at a gestational age of 31 weeks and three days due to cervical incompetence and without the huge resources to dream of saving the baby, they had already given up on the baby’s survival unless by sheer miracle.
The miracle came the way of baby Nkechi, as Mrs. Mbah came for the launch of the Enugu West Senatorial edition of her Mother and Child Healthcare and Welfare Project at Primary Healthcare Centre, Oji River where she went around to see patients and babies and also interacted with two-day old newborns and their nursing mothers mobilised to the event.
It was during that event at the Health Centre that the governor’s wife took notice of the baby and swung into action, riding with the baby and the mother straight to Enugu to try to salvage the situation through her Custos Care Foundation.
The governor’s wife, who kept checking on the baby also left an instruction to both the hospital and the medical team of her Foundation to leave no stone unturned and at whatever financial cost, to save the baby’s life
For the overjoyed mother, the hospital, and the wife of the governor and her Foundation, it was therefore a prayer answered as mother and child were discharged on March 29, instructively on a Good Friday.
Mrs. Rapuluchukwu Mmedo, who could not hide her emotions, described Mrs. Mbah’s intervention as a miracle, as they had already given up hope.
“For us, we knew the kind of money required to keep our baby in a newborn ICU was certainly out of our reach and something we could not dream of in the first place. But this miracle happened for us through this compassionate and humble woman. She treated us like royalties.
“I’m overjoyed. I’m so grateful to God and our governor’s wife. I thank the hospital and Custos Care Foundation. I’m overjoyed,” she said.
